City of Fire by Robert Ellis Read Free Book Online

spite of the horror of the crime—whom it hurt and what it left behind—she hoped they could work together like this.

LENA’S eyes snapped across the white carpet between the books laid out on the floor, following the spots leading to the desk in the study. There were two, so small and colorless that she hadn’t noticed them when she’d first entered the house and taken a cursory glance at the room.
    She stepped aside as a tech entered the foyer with an ultraviolet light and headed down the hall toward the bedroom. Then she dropped her notepad on the floor and slipped beneath the crime scene tape stretched across the doorway. Inching forward on her stomach, she worked her way down the carpet until she reached the first drop.
    She felt her heart flutter in her chest and tried to get a grip on herself.
    It was semen. And it hadn’t dried in the cool, moist air.
    She arched her back and leaned forward. As she studied the carpet beneath the desk, she spotted a third drop hidden in the shadows at the base of the chair. Her eyes rose to the computer and lingered there as she thought it over. When she heard someone enter the foyer, she turned and saw Novak moving toward the doorway.
    “Have you seen a thermostat?” he asked. “Gainer’s trying to guesstimate the time of death. They’re gonna move the body.”
    “On the wall behind you,” she said. “But the temps are in my notes. What’s he saying?”
    Novak knelt down and grabbed her notepad. “Between one and three. She’s just beginning to harden up.”
    Lena took a deep breath, staring at the carpet and mulling over the implications of her discovery. The horror that it implied. She turned to Novak, back-paging his way through her notes. He was studying the diagrams she’d made of the bedroom as if the lines and measurements might provide a certain degree of order to a world that had been ripped off its axis and thrown down the hill.
    “They’re on the first page,” she said.
    He nodded, jumping ahead in the book until he found them.
    “We’ve got a problem, Hank.”
    “That’s one way of putting it.”
    He had something on his mind and wasn’t listening to her. After writing the temperatures down on a blank sheet of paper, he tossed her notepad on the floor.
    “Whoever did this didn’t run away,” she said.
    Novak started to get up. “Maybe not.”
    “There’s no maybe about it. He did what he did to Nikki Brant, and then he sat at this desk and used the computer. You ever hear of anyone hanging out to surf the Web?”
    He gave her a long look. She had his attention now.
    “Why are you lying on the floor?” he asked.
    She pointed to the carpet without saying anything. Novak’s eyes rolled off her finger and stopped on the first drop of semen. A moment passed. What the image implied had a certain amount of juice.
    “Gainer doesn’t think she was raped,” he said. “There’s no vaginal bruising. He thinks she did it with someone she knew.”
    It hung there. Someone she
knew….
    Lena thought about the semen found on the sheet between Nikki Brant’s legs. The appearance of her vagina and the lack of any visible discharge. Someone had attempted to clean her up.
    “What about the autopsy?” she asked.
    “We’re in,” Novak said. “Late this afternoon. I told Lamar to meet us there.”
    “We’ll need the UV lights,” she said. “We need to scan this room. And we’ll need to pull the computer.”
    Novak agreed, his eyes following the drops of semen across the floor to the desk. As she turned back, Rhodes stepped into the foyer from the kitchen doorway.
    “Things just got stupid,” he said. “Take a look.”
    She slid beneath the crime scene tape, following Novak into the kitchen. The dishwasher was open. Rhodes pointed to the twelve-inch chef’s knife in the upper tray. The blade was forged from a single piece of high-carbon steel and appeared sharp enough and long enough to be the murder weapon. On the counter Lena noticed six